“The wizards represent all that the true "muggle" most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!”
Salon (31 March 1999)
1990s
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Joanne K. Rowling29
British novelist, author of the Harry Potter series 1965Related quotes
“Religion has nothing more to fear than not being sufficiently understood.”
Stanisław Leszczyński (1677–1766) king of Poland
No. 36.
Maxims and Moral Sentences
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist
in Lives of the Literature, edited by William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch
1970s-1980s
Scott Lynch (1978) American writer
In George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois (eds.) Rogues (p. 245)
Short fiction, A Year and a Day in Old Theradane (2014)
“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Source: 1910s, Why Men Fight https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_Men_Fight (1917), pp. 178-179 <br class="br">Context: Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
“Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.”
Umberto Eco book The Name of the Rose
Variant: Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.”" -
Source: The Name of the Rose